1. The Field of the Invention
The invention relates to systems and methods for managing data from disparate sources. Specifically, the invention relates to methods, and systems for collecting and reviewing data related to network accessible services such as Web Services.
2. The Relevant Art
The increased interconnectivity, computing power, and publishing capabilities associated with the growth of the Internet have spurred acceptance and deployment of electronic commerce and other inter-network enabled applications. Corporations, individuals, and organizations of all types are now interacting and conducting commerce through this exponentially increasing medium. The expanding potential of the medium presents opportunities for new applications and methods of doing business as well as automation of existing intra-entity and inter-entity processes and systems.
Despite the tremendous potential of the Internet, barriers to the full exploitation of electronic commerce remain. For example, computing systems from different cooperating entities often have difficulty communicating. Typically, expensive custom programming is required. The cost and delays associated with linking different systems into a single common system have limited deployment to these specific tasks and markets where cooperating entities are highly motivated to conduct business with one another.
A communications and computing paradigm often referred to as Web Services provides a new model for creating network accessible applications. A significant focus of Web Services is on creating infrastructure for discovering, utilizing, and managing available services developed by various entities around the world. Several emerging standards such as WSDL (Web Services Description Language), UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) and RDF (Resource Description Framework) attempt to provide publicly accessible means for publishing and utilizing Web Services.
To more fully understand what a Web Service is and how it is used in the context of a software program, and in order to more fully appreciate the deficiencies of the prior art, we can consider several fictitious businesses that provide Web Services dealing with securities trading such as stocks and bonds. Company A may publish a Web Service that will buy and sell stocks. Company B may also publish a Web Service that will also buy and sell stocks. Those Web Services may exhibit different calling conventions, perhaps accepting different parameters and returning different values based solely on the needs of each individual company.
These companies may also choose to publish WSDL documents to a UDDI registry to make the Web characteristics of each published service publicly available. Nevertheless, a customer of these services (in this case, a software program making invocations on the Web Services) must either previously know how to handle both companies' services, or limit themselves to using either one or the other. Hence, the need for a uniform and consistent representation of WSDL documents is readily seen by virtue of the deficiencies exhibited by the scenario described.
Despite the emerging efforts to automate inter-entity interaction, human judgment and analysis remains a critical component. Systems and methods are needed to facilitate better automated discovery and analysis of informational and functional services such as Web Services. The ability to automatically collect, organize and display results provided by various services in a consistent manner would facilitate automated selection and deployment of useful services within network-based systems and applications.